I recently moved my blog from http://www.alexandrasamuel.com/blog to http://www.alexandrasamuel.com. That involved not only moving my actual WordPress program files but also figuring out how to redirect visitors following outdated links to my old content.
Today the ever-helpful Boris Mann pointed out that the way I had originally set up redirects totally messed up my RSS feeds and search engine results. He pointed me towards the beauty of 301 redirects, which do a nice job of preserving past and current search results.
So for the record, here is THE simple how-to for handling redirects after moving a WordPress blog (it’s been a couple of weeks since my original move so I can’t remember the steps that were required to move the WordPress install itself, but I think there’s info out there on that.) I’m basing my example URLs here on what I just went through, i.e. moving WordPress from a subdirectory (www.yoursite.com/blog) to the root directory (www.yoursite.com)
- Open your .htaccess file (in the directory that houses your newly moved WordPress files) and edit in either your host’s file manager interface or by downloading to your local machine.
- Insert a line at the top that reads:
redirect 301 /blog/ http://www.yoursite.com/
Make sure to insert the opening and trailing / at the beginning and end of the originating path (e.g. /blog/) and to insert the trailing / at the end of the destination path (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com) - Save your .htaccess file (and if you’re editing on your local machine rather than on the server, re-upload it).
- Load your old WordPress URL (e.g http://www.yoursite.com/blog) to make sure this worked.
- Enjoy the redirecting goodness.
I admit it’s a bit counterintuitive that the path you’re moving from needs to be input as just a path (e.g. /blog/ with no http://URL before it) while the path you’re moving to needs to be input as the full URL (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com). Maybe it’s just my server? But the Internet is a capricious and mysterious creature so I don’t ask, I simply do what works.
Thanks to the helpful article on 301 redirects at Taming the Beast for pointing me towards the right syntax.
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Alexandra,
YOU’RE A GODDESS! I honestly owe you my life..
I’m right in the middle of moving our website (www.watchmactv.com) to a new domain..and I’ve been racking my brain with .htaccess to get redirects working properly.
Thank you so much!
-Asif
MacTV Videocast
Thank you so much for sharing this! I was having so much trouble with this and you’ve really saved me here.
Thank you thank you
I have done this and it doesn’t work. Obviously I have done something different with my move to what you have done, but what?
http://www.hubbers.com/blog/
Could it be that i am on IIS?
Hubbers, I wonder if this is due to changes in subsequent versions of WordPress? Anyone else care to weigh in?